The Sacred Canopy: Religion and World-Construction

Vocabulary flashcards covering key sociological concepts from Chapter 1 of Peter L. Berger's 'The Sacred Canopy'.

Society (in dialectic terms)

A phenomenon that is a human product, and nothing but a human product, which yet continuously acts back upon its producer.

Externalization

The ongoing outpouring of human being into the world, through both physical and mental activity.

Objectivation

The process by which the products of human activity attain a reality that confronts its original producers as a facticity external to and other than themselves.

Internalization

The reappropriation by men of objectivated reality, transforming it back from structures of the objective world into structures of subjective consciousness.

Homo sapiens (uniqueness)

A species characterized by being curiously 'unfinished' at birth, with an instinctual structure that is both underspecialized and undirected toward a species-specific environment.

Culture

The totality of man's material and non-material products, which serves to provide firm structures for human life that are lacking biologically.

Essential Sociality of Man

The fundamental anthropological fact that the world-building activity of man is always and inevitably a collective enterprise.

Social Control

Procedures specifically designed to 'bring back into line' recalcitrant individuals or groups.

Socialization

The processes by which a new generation is initiated into cultural meanings and taught to live in accordance with the institutional programs of society.

Nomos

A meaningful order imposed upon the discrete experiences and meanings of individuals through world-building activity.

Anomy

The state of radical separation from the social world where an individual loses orientation, identity, and sense of reality, exposing them to ultimate meaninglessness.

Marginal Situations

Situations, such as dreams, fantasies, or death, where an individual is driven close to or beyond the boundaries of the order determining routine everyday existence.

Cosmization

The projection of humanly constructed order into the universe as such, identifying the humanly meaningful world with the cosmos.

Religion

The human enterprise by which a sacred cosmos is established; cosmization in a sacred mode.

Sacred

A quality of mysterious and awesome power, other than man and yet related to him, believed to reside in certain objects, beings, or spaces of experience.

Profane

Phenomena or routine everyday activities that lack sacred status.

Chaos

The deep opposed category to the sacred, representing the terrible contrary of order and the abyss of meaninglessness.

Legitimation

Socially objectivated 'knowledge' that serves to explain and justify the social order by providing answers to questions about the 'why' of institutional arrangements.

Reality sui generis

A concept developed by Émile Durkheim describing society's status as an objective reality independent of individual subjective control.

Eccentricity (Plessner)

A term coined by Helmut Plessner referring to the innate instability in man's relationship to his own body.